I have to slightly agree about the milky way. I think, IMO, that its a bit too ..if I can find the right word.. garish? As in, it's so colourful and beautiful and such, but its a bit TOO colourfull and over-textured.

I'm just saying, because I'm wondering what the milky way WOULD look like with your own eyes from a point in space. I'm fairly sure the new texture is a combined texture from various wavelengths, not just the visible part of the spectrum.

I think subtly is best. But the new milky way is anything but subtle, and I think it might detract from the rest of a scene.

A way to mitigate this might be to have some sort of transparency slider, so you could "tune down" the brightness of the milky way texture.

Anyway, not to bash on SpaceEngineer at all. His hard work is GREAT! Just expressing my opinion.

The Milky Way that you see in the sky in SE is not a texture, it is a fully 3D sprite model seen from the inside, like being in a nebula. To see the effect in action all you have to do is fly through the galaxy or out of it. And the brightness of the galaxy sprites can be adjusted (you can see that same option now, go into SE and press F7 and adjust the galaxy exposure). I agree that the default galaxy sprite brightness in 0.97 looks too bright, so I plan to set it to a lower level. When it comes out mess with that slider that I mentioned and see what looks best to you, then go to the main.cfg file and set the default to whatever value you liked. 3.0 or 3.5 will probably look nice.

It may be a bit bright, but it is not too colorful. The Milky Way color is actually quite realistic, and is not substantially different from the current version aside from the improved dust sprites. Also, most screenshots released to date have not reflected the final appearance of the Milky Way.

Oh yeah? Fair enough, maybe its a case that real life looks too much like a hollywood movie. I'm so used to seeing a "milky" splash across the night sky when I look up, with no colours, just the barest hint of a structure with patches of darker and lighter. It's what I imagine the night sky to look like without any atmosphere in the way too.

SE simulates a camera with a dimmer limiting magnitude than the naked eye, so it should look brighter and more colorful than it does to your eye. Also, since the galaxy is a sprite model there are limits to how realistic it can look. Other planetarium software that views only from the Solar system does not have that limitation and so can use textures and configure the sky to look just like it does to the naked eye. And anyway, so many of SE's settings are configurable that you can adjust it to make it look just the way you want. When 0.97 comes out and I finalize my settings for it I'll post them in this thread in case you want to see what things can be adjusted to what effect without having to spend two hours figuring it out by trial and error.

This shows the color of the Milky Way fairly well (bluish-white arms and a yellow interior) and has a similar galaxy brightness to the 0.97 default.

Not really. For stars more than 45° above the horizon, the dimming due to the atmosphere is only a few tenths of a magnitude. So the difference in brightness of the Milky Way as seen by the eye is not very significant.

The most important effects of the atmosphere are the limits it poses to resolving capability (turbulence typically limits this to roughly 1 arcsecond, but this is irrelevant to naked-eye observing other than it makes bright stars appear to twinkle) and the absorption of certain wavelengths of radiation (also irrelevant to naked-eye observing).

So to the human eye, there's no appreciable difference in the appearance of the Milky Way from the ground versus space.

Having seen the Milky Way from a true dark site in the southern hemisphere, I can say that to the fully dark-adapted eye, it looks very similar to how it is presented in Space Engine, only not quite as bright and without the color saturation. (The eye can't detect color at low light intensities). I am really happy with how the Milky Way looks in Space Engine, and the only thing I would do is reduce the brightness slightly, which can be done at the user level as Harbinger noted.

Having seen the Milky Way from a true dark site in the southern hemisphere, I can say that to the fully dark-adapted eye, it looks very similar to how it is presented in Space Engine, only not quite as bright and without the color saturation. (The eye can't detect color at low light intensities). I am really happy with how the Milky Way looks in Space Engine, and the only thing I would do is reduce the brightness slightly, which can be done at the user level as Harbinger noted.

I totally agree! Seeing the Milky Way from a dark location, where all artificial lights are absent, it looks quite like the new Milky Way in version 0.97, even though in reality it looks white/blueish. Although from photos of the central parts our galaxy (near Sagittarius and Scorpius), it appears yellow, thanks to color sensitivity of the camera, far better than our eyes